As part of his keynote address on Sunday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, Gates showed off Windows Home Server (more info at Ars) - a consumer device to serve as a central storage place for digital photos, music and other media. The first products are due out later this year from HP and others. The goal is to get devices that can cost less than USD 500. In the first of a two-part interview, Microsoft's chairman talks about why the average person wants a server, why they won't need a degree in computer science to run it and what hurdles remain before consumers reach the true digital home.

Let's forget that alot of potential users have ISP server agreements that technically prohibit using one of these (as stupid as it may sound, but read your Verizon or Comcast TOS).

The thing is that the MS vision is a unit that's basically a PC with Windows and just enough web-sugar on top to permit remote admin without their usually obtuse admin stuff.

That's fine and dandy, but the fact of the matter is that it still leaves you with something that is still more difficult to setup than current NAS products (including FreeNAS for you Linux fans), hardware that uses considerably more power and that is more expensive. On top of that, it's running an operating system with all sorts of superfluous bits to it that just means that there's that much more places for things to go bad.

I'll buy that a NAS is a good idea. Unfortunately, my impression from reading Microsoft's marketing copy on it is that they don't get it.